Ilga Minjon
in(ter)dependent curator, writer & educator in arts
Kind Bio
I’m a curator, writer and educator based in Amsterdam. Working closely together with artists across disciplines, I aim to weave together future imaginaries from liberatory, decolonial and feminist re-writings of belonging. My research and practice’s interests revolve around health, architecture and ecology, and the roles that technology, ritual and power structures inhabit in imagining ever-evolving, nonlinear pasts and futures.
My curatorial work emphasises the mediation between storytelling, critical theory, collectivity and sensing across public, digital, intimate and institutional spaces.
I’m an advisor for Stadscuratorium Amsterdam, a city-wide commission for arts in public space, and a tutor at Design Academy Eindhoven. Other work includes experiments in audio/radio and exchanges around pedagogies of collectivity.
Professional background
As curator of visual arts at Stroom Den Haag (2016-2024) I curated numerous exhibitions and programmes around the politics of imagination, the body in relation to space, and uncertainty as site for experimental imaginaries. Curated projects include: Attempts to Read the World (Differently): Three Exhibitions in Five Acts, an unfolding range of solo exhibitions by with Max de Waard, Monira Al Qadiri and Jean Katambayi Mukendi. Lawrence Lek: Nøtel (The Hague); Yvonne Dröge Wendel: To Be To Gather; Neo Matloga: my hero is always next to me; and From the Sea to the Clouds to the Soil: a group show about sensing in a web of relations with Femke Herregraven, Risk Hazekamp, Urok Shirhan, Yeon Sung, and Natasha Tontey.
I initiated and curated the longrunning Uncertainty Seminars, an experimental range of events, exploring the politics of doubt as a cultural strategy.
I studied art history with an emphasis on Medieval iconography and religious cultures as well as Modern and Contemporary Arts History (MA, Utrecht University) with an emphasis on image and language.
In the mists of time, I worked as a co-curator of public programmes, Impakt Festival and ongoing international residencies at Impakt [Centre for Media Culture] (2011-2015); at Frans Halsmuseum | De Hallen Haarlem for exhibitions and collection research and communication (2010-2011), and as gallery assistant at Ellen de Bruijne Projects. Next to this, I’ve been a frequent collaborator for residencies, artists and cultural events in Bijlmer and Amsterdam Southeast.
Image: distorted image of Daisy Lafarge, Lovebug, 2023, p 112
Kind Advisor
As a member of Stadscuratorium Amsterdam, I work to formulate advice around procedures, representation and social urgencies of new and existing public artworks, and how they integrate in the layered local ecologies of Amsterdam.
A team of curators, artists, architects and professionals in the field of arts, we provide official recommendations as well as unsollicited advice to the municipality of Amsterdam.
Read more about Stadscuratorium Amsterdam: https://stadscuratorium.nl/en/about/
No. 03
Kind Writing
Published texts by me include:
Subjectivity is a quality: Interview with Ilga Minjon/Subjectiviteit is een Kwaliteit: Interview met Ilga Minjon
Renske de Jong, Annet Zondervan, Nicole Santé (eds.), Live, Learn, Create... Repeat - BijlmAIR. 25 Years Artists in Amsterdam Southeast, 2026, pp. 31-43
image below: Catalogue page 37, featuring an image of Sel Kofiga’s performance in Amsterdam Southeast in 2022, courtesy the artist
Josefin Arnell: Notes on Adulting
A text tracing the wider context of ‘adult rituals’ in the framework of Josefin Arnell’s photoseries “Dinner”, 2024
melanie bonajo: Ecologies of Compassion
A profile of melanie bonajo’s practice for the occasion of When The Body Says Yes, their representation in the Dutch Pavilion for the Venice Biennial, 2022, written for: Metropolis M, translated for FOMU, Antwerp in 2023
Ramon Amaro: To Resist the Temptation of Coherence
A background article on the practice of Ramon Amaro’s Darkness, as a first act of creation. In: "Darkness, as a first act of creation", XXII Triennale di Milano, Italy, 2019, commissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, NL. Article for: De Groene Amsterdammer
In Other Words: Image and Language in the conceptual legacy of Marcel Broodthaers
essay commissioned by P/////AKT, in: Le Pense-Bête Image below: design of the catalogue by Dongyoung Lee
Kind Hosting and moderation
I’m a frequent collaborator to institutions, arts spaces, collectives and thinkers to host, moderate and (live) interview for events and radio on the intersections of arts, politics, technology, music and nightlife.
Recent moderations include Cem A.’s CritClub at Impakt (Utrecht, NL), The Magic Circle: Playing Outside Time at De Appel (Amsterdam, NL), Unravel Symposium: The Thead Weaves the World, at Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, NL), and Stressing Solidarity: Witnessing Palestine through Art and Architecture at Framer Framed (Amsterdam, NL).
Former collaborations include CBK Zuidoost, Museumn8 Amsterdam, Mobiele omroep Bijlmer (MOB) with Jesper Buursink and vinger.nl.
No. 05
Kind Contextual collaborations
Artists I work with on close curation, contextualisation, co-writing or texts, production, and iterations of projects include Josefin Arnell, Kathrin Schlegel and others
image: still from Josefin Arnell’s Dinner Party, 2024
Kind Teaching in higher arts education
Since 2015, I have been working as a design and arts theory educator, tutor, examinor and policy advisor in several academic institutions in The Netherlands.
I teach an ongoing course in critical context and design research called Contextual Studies for the Fundamentals Programme Bachelor at Design Academy Eindhoven.
In 2024-2025 I was thesis supervisor for the Bachelor Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Arts The Hague/Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten Den Haag.
In 2024-2025 I was guest tutor and advisor at the temporary Master’s programme Planetary Poetics, at Sandberg Institute
I have a degree in Didactics (Fontys, 2017)
Kind Researh in motion
My current research is on sensing, health, Queerness and Disability justice in relation to ecological repair in artistic and field practices.
If any framework of multispecies restoration or ‘justice’ can be understood as correlated with human and non-human health and repair, my focus is on imaginaries of decolonising ecology and belonging to land, in the Dutch context.
I use the lens “environmentalism of the injured” (Sunaura Taylor 2024), interrogating sickness and injury as a multispecies concept of corrupted ecologies (1), here as well as in Dutch colonial contexts (2), responsive to speculative alternatives, community, and worldmaking.
A key field of interest is the (assumed) loss and restorative potential of European Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), rooted in interrelations of weather, plantlife, animals and other species.
The curatorial model I propose for meaningful exchange across constituent bodies and disciplines, moves away from the apolitical, institutional and individuated practice, toward curating that is relational, embodied and custodial. Analogous to the human role in traditional caresystems, it welcomes codevelopment, storytelling beyond ocularcentric and able-bodied experiences, and vistas of an Otherwise: ‘reckon[ing] with the power structures that have led to the current situation and offer a space to collectively imagine the possibility of reparitive futures’ (3).
(1) Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert, 2024
(2) I.e. pertaining to the European Dutch and the Dutch colonial present contexts of Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba; as well as the historic colonies of Dutch empire and their presentday inheritances
(3) Amal Alhaag and Selene Wendt, ’Introducing: Sustaining the Otherwise’, in Amal Alhaag, Selene Wendt (eds), Researching the Otherwise, 2026, p. 10
Curatorial projects
Kind Curated Projects
Pub. 2022//Stroom Den Haag
From The Sea to the Soil to the Clouds was a group exhibition I curated with Risk Hazekamp, Femke Herregraven, Urok Shirhan, Yeon Sung and Natasha Tontey at Stroom Den Haag. In close curation wih the artists, the project unfolded over principles of technology and the ecological urgencies of sensing in a web of relations.
To understand the world in relation is to link patterns and connections beyond the human experience. The exhibiting artists, each in their own manner, practice a sense of wild ethics, as David Abram coins: “An attentive openness, not just toward other persons but also toward the inexhaustible otherness of the manifold beings that compose this earthly world". Sensing that we inhabit this world alongside molds, asphalt, animals, ancestors, storm clouds, bacteria, and other beings, could offer us valuable strategies to foster resilience on a drastically changing planet. We invite you to consider what, at a cellular level, our bodies already know: "The intuition that we inhabit a breathing cosmos - the awareness that the sensible things around us are, like our own creaturely bodies, sensitive and even sentient powers” (David Abram, ‘Wild Ethics and Participatory Science’, in Kinship. Belonging in a World of Relations, 2021)
Website of the Stroom Den Haag project page
Kind Curated Projects
Pub. 2023//The Hmm
The Hmm is a platform for internet cultures operating with critical and creative inspections of visual, social and technological phenomenon. They invited me to curate an evening at CBK Zuidoost, against the backdrop of the exhibition Knights In Shining Armour, inviting 7 guests to present how they marry their visions to their online expressions.
Link to the programme on The Hmm
Kind Curated Projects: Uncertainty Seminars
Pub. 2019-2023//Stroom Den Haag
Uncertainty Seminars was a series of events centering experimental practices embracing doubt and hesitation as a cultural strategy in a world of manifactured mass confusion. The series was conceived and initiated by me, and executed in collaboration with many. How can uncertainty become a throughline for reluctance, inefficiency and refusal of solutionism? What can be collectively envisioned outside of the norms toward alternative abundance? Commissioning artists, performers, sound pieces, writers, choreographera, collectives and thinkers, the events took place in different public formats to investigate notions of imagination, positioning otherwise, and deep listening, through talks, walks, high tea parties, reading groups, dinners, symposiums, screenings, performance and hybrid webcasts. In 2019, I curated the programme together with independent curator Radna Rumping, where we commisioned an audio trailer for each edition as a sonic introduction and luring toward the event. From 2021 the events were co-curated with Lua Vollaard, my fellow curator at Stroom Den Haag.
https://uncertainty.stroom.nl/
Spatial Design and graphic identity and website: The Rodina
Image: showing the backdrop of the spatial design by The Rodina during the first Uncertainty Seminars, September 2019, screening Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Opaque (2014).
Kind Reading Group Goddess Exchange
Pub. 2024//Buro Stedelijk, Amsterdam
For Manifestation #60: Reading Group Goddess Change series by Anna Hoetjes and Müge Yılmaz, I selected texts from Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood, 1987-89 and from Daisy Lafarge, Lovebug, 2023.
As a vantage point of the session, we investigated topics of health, intimacy and microbiology in science(fiction) and literature. As we observe the harmful and scientifically outdated military rethoric of the body’s immune system that protects itself against ‘invasions’ from the ‘outside’ being evermore normalised, Butler and Lafarge gingerly dismantle the assumed binaries between illness and health; outsider and insider; host and hosted.
In her epic trilogy of Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago, Octavia Butler shaped a deeply detailed, entangled world in which an extraterrestrial species have an inane desire to heal and merge with others, sharply contrasted with humans’ hierarchical nature and beliefs. Through what Walidah Imarisha has called visionary fiction, Butler prompts existential questions about relationality and the politics of living together.
In the overt surfacing of fascism in Dutch and western societies, commonly used metaphors of parasites to describe and dehumanise people that are projected to be a ‘non-self’ are regaining popularity. Not only does this metaphorical binary weaponise people’s fear and legitimise racist violence, in Lovebug Lafarge traces how science, biology, archeology and other fields increasingly demonstrate how the binary between self and other is most persistently, an imagined one.
Link to the programme on Buro Stedelijk
Kind Curated Projects: Lawrence Lek, Nøtel (The Hague)
Pub. 2018//Stroom Den Haag
With Nøtel (The Hague), I initiated the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands by Lawrence Lek at Stroom Den Haag, which I co-curated with Lua Vollaard. This multimedia installation transformed the exhibition space into the marketing suite of the Nøtel Corporation — a fictional hotel chain that promotes a fully automated, luxurious lifestyle. ‘Designed by world-renowned architects, Nøtel offers a secure environment for a future nomadic elite, where secrecy and safety are paramount’. Through a science-fiction scenario, Lek’s work speculated on the future of labor, technology, and the relationship between citizen and state.